In the 1970s, CFOs sat
with CEOs and devised
ways for upset consumers
to not be able to get
compensation easily.
They put up automated
phone systems and
arcane and inflexible
policies and rejoiced at
how little the company
had to “give up” to
complaining customers.
And this system worked… until social media gave
every average “Joe” the same power as society’s
most prominent citizens to get a company’s
attention when they weren’t happy.
Watching F8 last month, one couldn’t help but
wonder if the future is truly as simple as opening a
chat and texting what you need. Order flowers ✔
Get news ✔ Check the weather ✔ Handle customer
service issues?
How many of us who have called our cable company
and been on hold “forever” wouldn’t love to chat with
a rep and get our issue handled in a minute ( Amy
Schumer would agree )? How many of us would love
to chat with an airline and resolve an issue in real
time? While these things sound great in theory, it’s
not quite so simple.
Chat is a better medium than the phone for most
people, especially younger people. But it doesn’t
solve everything. An inarticulate consumer is going
to be inarticulate over chat. A rep that’s having a
bad day is going to be just as inflexible and
unsympathetic in a chat. Changing the medium isn’t
a silver bullet for customer service.
Bots can help with customer service. They can
gather information for the eventual interaction with a
human rep, understand exactly what happened and
what the consumer wants and even be empowered
to solve basic issues, automatically.
Bots have been around a long time — phone systems
ask you to speak your account number, say what
you’re calling about or push a digit corresponding to
what you want. The difference is that, while those
kinds of bots typically annoy customers, chatbots
have the potential to have the reverse effect.
The right balance of “bot” and “human” is going to
be different for each company, and it depends
greatly on the quality of the bot — and, of course,
the quality of their human customer service reps.
I believe in an intelligent mix of humans and bots to
get the job done — the “job” being making a
consumer happy when things go awry, while being
fair to the business.